Ann Austin and Mary Fisher Arrested

Church History Timeline

On this day, July 11, 1656, the authorities
in Boston, Massachusetts were dismayed. Aboard the Swallow,
which had just sailed into harbor, were two Quaker women, the first
Quakers to reach the colony. Massachusetts was a Puritan commonwealth.
Its leaders believed that a Christian state had an obligation to
regulate religious belief and behavior. Admitting believers from other
denominations would eventually unbalance the arrangement between
government and church. This was especially true of Quakers, who were
notorious for acts of civil disobedience whenever their personal
convictions conflicted with government policy. To most denominations of
the day, the Quakers, with their rejection of traditional theology could
be defined with one word: heretics.

Deputy Governor Richard Bellingham acted quickly. He confined Ann
Austin and Mary Fisher to the ship and ordered the public executioner to
burn all of the literature that they had brought with them. He knew the
power of print to go where evangelists could not.

On second thought, it seemed better to Bellingham to place the women
where the state, not a shipmaster, had control of them. So he brought
them ashore: Ann, an old woman, the mother of five children; and Mary, a
former serving maid, aged 33. Earlier that year she had been whipped in
England for saying that it was wrong to make a vocation out of
preaching.

In Boston, the two underwent a severe ordeal. They were examined by
the magistrates and "found not only to be transgressors of the former
laws, but to hold very dangerous, heretical, and blasphemous opinions;
and they do also acknowledge that they came here purposely to propagate
their said errors and heresies, bringing with them and spreading here
sundry books, wherein are contained most corrupt, heretical, and
blasphemous doctrines contrary to the truth of the gospel here professed
amongst us."

Bellingham refused them food. He cut off their light by boarding up
the prison window and refused them candles or writing material. Both
were stripped and searched for signs of witchcraft. Boston would have
been pleased to have hanged them had anything incriminating been found.
To ensure that no one caught their radical ideas, the men in power
declared that anyone attempting to speak with the women would be fined
five pounds--a hefty chunk of change in those days.

These Quaker women had come by way of Barbados to publish the truth
as they saw it. Now hunger gnawed their bellies and their prayers went
up to heaven. It seems God heard, for the innkeeper bribed the jailer
five shillings a week to smuggle food to the hungry women.

At the end of five weeks, Massachusetts brought the women out and
sent them home on the ship that had brought them. The Captain was made
to deposit 100 pounds as a guarantee that he'd return them to England.
No doubt the Puritans hoped to make the transportation of Quakers a
money-losing proposition for ship-owners.

Eventually, sterner measures were used against Quakers. Some were
whipped; some were abandoned in forests; some had their ears cut off and
some were hung. But Quakers kept coming; their persistence helped win
America's civil rights.

Bibliography:

Perry, William Stevens. History of the American Episcopal
Church. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1885. Source of the Image.